In this article we discuss our creative research on and with a contested coastal community on one of the UK's last existing plotlands, the humberston Fitties. Plotlands can be briefly defined as ...places where individuals have historically self‐built holiday houses. This 56‐acre strip of land with 319 chalets is on the Humber estuary and lies close to Cleethorpes, a seaside resort, and Grimsby, a seaport now facing post‐industrial decline. Our cross‐disciplinary collaborative practice between poetry and visual art explores open, environmentally aware engagements and methodologies with landscape and rural place. We investigate the relation of social, environmental and energy politics, looking out to land and sea and back to the community. Our results include original art and poetry presented innovatively together in exhibitions and books, in addition to local people's responses to our methodologies and the work itself.
We have worked since 2013 on and with a contested coastal community on one of the U.K.'s last existing plotlands, the Humberston Fitties in North East Lincolnshire. Here, since between the ...wars, local people and visitors have erected their diverse dwellings, in order to enjoy the simple, restorative pleasures of seaside life. This painting and poems are from the series Night Fitties They explore the play of light and dark and the uncanny transformations of the chalets that take place after hours as well as notions of vulnerability, occupation and emptiness. The work considers, in the shadow of recent dramatic political changes, how notions of place and identity are constructed on domestic and larger scales, as reflected by the play on flags and other indications of Englishness. Our cross-disciplinary collaborative practice between poetry and visual art explores open, environmentally-aware engagements and methodologies with landscape and place. We investigate the relation of social, environmental and energy politics on micro and macro scales, looking out to land and sea and back to the community. We are interested in the effects of radical open form text and paintings presented innovatively together and how this challenges audiences' assumptions. Resumen Hemos trabajado desde 2013 y con una disputada comunidad costera en uno de los últimos asentamientos temporales existentes en Reino Unido, los Humberston Fitties, al noreste de Lincolnshire. Aquí, desde el periodo de entreguerras, la gente local y los visitantes han erigido sus diversas moradas con el fin de disfrutar de los simples y vigorizantes placeres de la vida junto al mal. Esta pintura y poemas son de la serie Night Fitties. Exploran el juego de luces y sombras y las insólitas transformaciones de los chalets que tienen lugar después de hora, así como nociones de vulnerabilidad, ocupación y vacío. El trabajo considera, a la sombra de los dramáticos cambios políticos recientes, cómo las nociones de lugar e identidad se construyen a escala doméstica y a mayor escala, tal y como refleja el juego con las banderas y otras indicaciones de lo que es ser inglés. Nuestra práctica colaborativa interdisciplinar entre poesía y arte visual explora compromisos y metodologías con el paisaje y el lugar que son abiertos y medioambientalmente conscientes. Investigamos las políticas energéticas, sociales y medioambientales a menor y mayor escala, volviendo la vista hacia la tierra y al mar y de vuelta a la comunidad. Nos interesan los efectos de presentar juntos e innovadoramente textos de forma abierta y pinturas, y cómo esto desafía las suposiciones de la audiencia.
This is a jointly authored practice-led article by a poet and artist who have produced place-based work based on slow-walking practices for exhibition and publication since 2011. It is developed out ...of close reading of our own work, our key consideration being whether and how collaborative walking and art together might be conceived of as counter-cultural. We consider our walking inheritance, from the Romantics, via Thoreau to mid-century painters and poets and contemporary ecocritical theorists including Doreen Massey, Yi-fu Tuan, Deirdre Heddon and Richard Kerridge. We trace changes in theoretical and artistic approaches to walking, perception and making art together. We reference other contemporary poet and artist pairings including Frances Presley and Irma Irsara and Thomas A. Clark and Laurie Clark. Finally, we consider how walking and working collaboratively in different artistic media might produce work that challenges and affects viewers in gallery and book spaces.
This article discusses the pastoral aspects of the modernist poet H.D.'s work, while weaving in reference to some of the key tropes of environmentalism. It re-visits Greek epigram through the filter ...of H.D. and includes poetic, as well as critical, responses to her work. Tarlo reads and re-writes H.D. just as she read and re-wrote her 'Greek fragments'. (Author abstract)
The short poem in Figure 4.1 was written by the poet Harriet Tarlo, watching artist Judith Tucker draw, very early on in our collaborative place-based practice. In the subsequent years since we began ...to work together, this poem has become talismanic. It has been read aloud in numerous galleries, university lecture theatres and art galleries at openings, papers, talks and readings. Like all the place-based work we have made together, it has travelled a distance, on paper and in performance, from its origins outside, where we sat in September 2011, on the crumbling stone step of a long-deceased mill owner’s
This article is an introduction to contemporary experimental poetry by women. It considers the reasons for the resistance to such work in this country. It refutes arguments made against it, for ...example that avant-garde writing is elitist or not related to women's experience. It further suggests why this writing, in particular in its complex engagement with issues of language, subjectivity and gender, should in fact be of great interest to the woman/feminist reader. In particular, it suggests parallels between the concerns of this work and those of feminist poststructuralism. Above all, throughout the piece, it attempts to introduce the ‘provisional pleasures’ of the contemporary avant-garde to the reader, introducing, quoting and providing multiple interpretations of the work of several diverse writers in this tradition. It aims to provide a sense of the linguistic and formal innovations of these writings, alongside a sense of their relevance to questions of female subjectivity and of women's relationship to the dominant discourses of our time.
This article is an introduction to contemporary experimental poetry by women. It considers the reasons for the resistance to such work in this country. It refutes arguments made against it, for ...example that avant-garde writing is elitist or not related to women's experience. It further suggests why this writing, in particular in its complex engagement with issues of language, subjectivity and gender, should in fact be of great interest to the woman/feminist reader. In particular, it suggests parallels between the concerns of this work and those of feminist poststructuralism. Above all, throughout the piece, it attempts to introduce the 'provisional pleasures' of the contemporary avant-garde to the reader, introducing, quoting and providing multiple interpretations of the work of several diverse writers in this tradition. It aims to provide a sense of the linguistic and formal innovations of these writings, alongside a sense of their relevance to questions of female subjectivity and of women's relationship to the dominant discourses of our time.
Poet Harriet Tarlo and artist Judith Tucker discuss their collaboration over several years on a number of place-based projects. This dialogue between them was born of close observation of each ...other’s practice, and of their shared exploration of the similarities and differences between producing texts and producing images, both in and out of place. Examples of this collaboration show Tarlo’s radical landscape poems side by side with Tucker’s landscape drawings. One such place is an abandoned mill-owner’s garden, near their homes in the South Pennine landscape, where the house and mill have long been submerged in a reservoir. Further away from this familiar landscape, Tarlo and Tucker explored unfamiliar terrain on the Lincolnshire estuarial coast, where they contributed to the multi-disciplinary Excavations and Estuaries project. Within this chapter ecocritical ideas are integrated with the discussion of how this creative partnership has led to a body of work and the subsequent exhibitions and readings in which it has been taken to the public.
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